Arizona Board of Regents confirms five new Regents Professors
The highest faculty rank, Regents Professor appointments are limited to no more than 3% of the total number of the University's tenured and tenure-track faculty members. Regents Professors receive a medallion as part of the honor.
Price Fishback, professor, Department of Economics
Takeshi Inomata, professor, School of Anthropology
Chris Segrin, department head and Steve and Nancy Lynn Professor of Communication, Department of Communication
Kathy Short, professor, Department of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies
Todd Vanderah, department head and professor, Department of Pharmacology
The Arizona Board of Regents has confirmed the appointments of Price Fishback, Takeshi Inomata, Chris Segrin, Kathy Short and Todd Vanderah as Regents Professors.
The highest faculty rank, the title of Regents Professor is reserved for full professors whose exceptional achievements have brought national and international distinction. Regents Professor appointments are limited to no more than 3% of the total number of the University's tenured and tenure-track faculty members.
Price Fishback
APS Professor of Economics
Eller College of Management
Fishback is an economic historian whose research focuses on topics including the political economy of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, the American economy during World War II and changes in agriculture in response to climate, government policy and technology. His work is known for its methodology, especially data-intensive analyses, and has appeared in many peer-reviewed articles, literature surveys and books.
Fishback's research on coal miners, published in the book "Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930," showed that collective bargaining was critical to protecting laborers from exploitation. Another award-winning book, "A Prelude to the Welfare State," which Fishback wrote with Shawn Kanter, showed how employers, workers and insurers often all benefit from workers' compensation systems. And Fishback's literature survey on Progressive Era policies, published in the Journal of Economic Literature in 2000, showed that support for reforms by progressive employers contributed to new labor laws proposed by laborers.
Fishback is also a research affiliate at the Center for Economic History at Australian National University, a CAGE Fellow at Warwick University, a program scholar for the Hoover Program on Regulation and the Rule of Law, a fellow at the TIAA-CREF Institute and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Takeshi Inomata
Professor of Anthropology
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Inomata is an archaeologist whose research using drone-delivered light detection and ranging – known as lidar – to map Maya civilizations has changed the way the world looks at ancient Mesoamerica.
Inomata and an international team of colleagues in 2020 discovered a previously unknown ancient site at Aguada Fénix near Tabasco, Mexico. The site – which is the largest pre-Hispanic site in the region – dates to sometime between 800-1000 B.C., and contains the oldest monumental constructions ever found in the Maya culture. The discovery has reshaped how researchers view the history of the Maya, and how the history is taught in universities around the world.
Inomata's work at three major sites in Guatemala and Mexico has earned him an international reputation, attracting students to the University from all over the world. His mentorship has helped a record number of graduate students to receive grants from organizations such as the National Science Foundation. He has also established programs in Guatemala for students there to learn his techniques.
Chris Segrin
Steve and Nancy Lynn Professor of Communication
College of Social and Behavioral Sciences
Segrin is a leading scholar on how communication in relationships shapes physical and mental health outcomes, and his research highlights what are often considered society's "invisible" illnesses. He has been head of the Department of Communication for 20 years.
Segrin's contributions to the field include improving understanding of how married couples cope with cancer diagnoses and how helicopter parenting can cause mental health issues in children. His work often involves studying society's most vulnerable populations, including incarcerated people and Latina women with breast cancer. Segrin has published more than 200 journal articles and chapters and two books.
Segrin has received $16 million in research funding throughout his career from organizations such as the National Cancer Institute, the American Cancer Society and the Lance Armstrong Foundation. Last year, he was named a fellow of the International Communication Association.
Kathy Short
Professor of Teaching, Learning and Sociocultural Studies
College of Education
Short's research centers on how literature shapes the way children and young people understand and interact with the world. She is the founding director of the College of Education's Worlds of Words: Center of Global Literacies and Literatures, a collection of 40,000 books for children and adolescents.
Short created "critical content analysis," a research methodology that analyzes text and images found in children's literature to measure how literature shapes children's views of the world. Short has written, co-written or co-edited numerous books that are among the most cited in the field and have served as resources for educators around the world. She established Worlds of Words in 2007 to serve as an outreach space for faculty, students and the public; the center has more than 50,000 visitors each year.
Short has received grants from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Marshall Foundation. She received the Outstanding Educator in the Language Arts award in 2011 from the National Council of Teachers of English. Her colleagues elected her in 2019 to the Reading Hall of Fame, a national organization dedicated to improving reading instruction that recognizes literacy educators whose reputation is "widely known and respected by people in the profession."
Todd Vanderah
Department Head and Professor of Pharmacology
College of Medicine – Tucson
As one of the top researchers in pain and addiction, Vanderah engages in scholarship that directly addresses America's opioid epidemic, through research centered on chronic pain and how it can be reduced by opioids and cannabinoids. Vanderah also is director of the University's Comprehensive Pain and Addiction Center and a member of the BIO5 Institute.
Vanderah's research focuses on identifying novel molecular targets in the human body and novel compounds that can act on those targets to reduce chronic pain without leading to addiction. Specifically, his research looks at cannabinoids for chronic pain management. His work has led to a better understanding of how patients develop a tolerance to opioids, requiring them to take increasingly larger doses to continue feeling better. Vanderah is now working on developing novel nonaddictive therapeutics for pain.
Vanderah has mentored many graduate students, postdoctoral fellows and junior faculty, and has also led community outreach, including at K-12 schools and community centers. Under his leadership, the Department of Pharmacology was ranked fifth in research funding from the National Institutes of Health by the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Research.